Authors: Björn Klocke; Hans Georg Gemünden; Thomas Ritter
During the last years, networks of inter-organizational strategic alliances received bothmanagerial and academic attention. Alliance networks are a complex phenomenon thatstill poses many questions. One of them is how to describe and explain their dynamics.This article discusses results of our research on the dynamics of alliance networks withfocus on young technology-driven firms. We built on the literature about allianceformation during the life-cycle of the company. In the past, authors have found a nonlinearpattern of alliance formation during the first years of a company’s life and havelinked the pattern to a model of development stages.In an exploratory study based on a sample of product driven nanotechnologycompanies, we analyze the relationship between development stage and firm age andfind it to approximate a linear function. Firms differed in the time needed to developfrom one stage to the next. In order to describe these differences, we introduced a firmspecific variable called development speed, which turned out to be a function of certainfirm and industry specific factors. The factors with the strongest impact on developmentspeed were maturity of applied technology and maturity of the target market. Ourresults add to the understanding of network development and of its business-relateddrivers.
Journal: ( – )
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Publish Year: 2002
Conference: Perth, Australia (2002)